Is Purely Practical Agreement Possible?

The Heythrop Journal, 2009

Journal of Scientific Research and Development , 2016

The paper is focused on the impact of philosophical ideology of Jacque Maritain -one of the most prominent French philosophers of XX century - onto modern concept of human rights in their legal implementation. The perspectives of Maritain's basic developments for modern democracy are proved to be rather promising. J. Maritain was the first one who managed to unite philosophical anthropological theory (personalism) with actual participation in elaboration of the ideas of human rights oriented against totalitarian offence against the liberty of a person. An author of more than 60 books, J. Maritain helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is the principal drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The foundation of Maritain's thought lays in Aristotle, St. Thomas and the Thomistic treatments. Maritain was a strong defender of a natural law ethics. He viewed ethical norms as being rooted in human nature. For Maritain the natural law is known primarily, not through philosophical argument and demonstration, but rather through "Connaturality". Connatural knowledge is a kind of knowledge by acquaintance. We know the natural law through our direct acquaintance with it in our human experience. Of central importance, is Maritain's argument that natural rights are rooted in the natural law? This was the key to his involvement in the drafting of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Journal of the History of International Law / Revue d’histoire du droit international

Studies on the nature of human rights have reached an impasse largely due to a general resistance to engage with the continuity of ideas and theories drawn from religion, morality and ethics in the history of international law. With the impasse of human rights, the article refers to an epistemological deadlock about what human rights are. Studying the concept of natural rights, it is argued, offers a means of breaking this impasse and, ultimately, easing the current tension between historicism and essentialism in human rights theory. The article concludes that natural rights were means to decide the moral questions posed by the violent redistribution of (material) goods taken to be common by the theoreticians of the expanding European empires. Probing in this manner into natural rights’ early uses and embedded theories gives us new tools and fresh approaches to be employed in relation to the challenges posed by contemporary global politics.

Open Insight, 2018

This article offers an introduction to Jacques Maritain's relations with the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. First, it describes the marginal role of Maritain in the drafting process. Then, it explains the French philosopher's encounters with the most critical drafters, especially with those with more philosophical background and with those with whom we have enough sources to build up an argument.

British Yearbook of International Law, 2018

In this paper I examine the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. My analysis counters conventional narratives of consensus and imposition that characterise the development of the UN human rights regime. The central argument is intended to demonstrate that within the founding text of the contemporary human rights movement there is an ambiguous account of rights, which exceeds easy categorisation of international rights as universal moral principles or merely an ideological imposition by liberal powers. Acknowledging this ambiguous history, I argue, opens the way to an understanding of human rights as an ongoing politics, a contestation over the terms of legitimate political authority and the meaning of “humanity” as a political identity.

Fordham L. Rev., 2008

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 2019

Many writers reject the notion of universal human rights, insisting on their historically recent, Western-secular character. Other theorists emphasise mutual exchange between human rights and systems such as Confucianism, Buddhism, or Islam. They celebrate a common ground that would appear, moreover, to enhance the case for universality. This article acknowledges that common ground but rejects the view that it can strengthen the case for universality. Any such 'exchange', far from mutual, turns out to be dictated entirely by human rights. Familiar rhetoric about the supposed flexibility of human rights law, which would suggest genuinely interactive relationships between it and other belief systems, flatly contradicts its higher-law claims. Genuinely flexible human rights could only ever arise either (a) in the trivial sense that any broadly formulated legal rule ends up applied to a range of situations, or (b) in the untenable sense that human rights law would accommodate serious violations.

(2018) 63:2 The American Journal of Jurisprudence 189, 2018

Alasdair MacIntyre is often interpreted as a wholesale skeptic of human rights. Although understandable, given his caustic criticism of rights discourse and theory, this misunderstanding overlooks his openness to subjective moral rights within the context of social practices. This paper traces the roots of his skepticism to the practical embodiment of rights discourse within liberal modernity. In MacIntye’s view, the modes of claiming rights in practice presuppose the existence of natural rights, which commits the “individualist fallacy”: the potential value of the right for the individual right-holder is presumed to ground an adequate reason to impose duties on others, without due consideration of the constitutive social commitments necessary to make that value a matter for common action. And, any proposed theory of human rights runs the risk of justifying that use and institutional embodiment of the human rights concept in practice. Despite his negativity, this paper interrogates the extent to which MacIntyre’s thought remains open to justificatory foundations for some concept of “human rights” within the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition.